Some of these effects seem more related to Globalisation than NAFTA per se. There is a flight of jobs from developed to underdeveloped countries outside North America.
The analogy seems a bit skewed as well. Brer Rabbit asked not be thrown into the briar patch because he wanted to be thrown into it, but surely Canadians and Americans who insist that NAFTA is great and that the last thing we want is out do not want out of NAFTA or NAFTA re-opened.
Please don't throw us outta the NAFTA patch
>by Rick Salutin
March 7, 2008
What's with the NAFTA panic attacks some Canadians are having? They can't really believe the Americans would pull out of their big trade deal with us and Mexico. Maybe it's strategy on their part, like that trickster Brer Rabbit. Brer Fox traps Brer Rabbit and is carrying him to the cook pot. "Do anything to me," pleads the rabbit, "but don't throw me into the briar patch." So the fox does. But don't throw us out of the NAFTA patch. Right. If only.
Can anyone honestly think little Mexico and puny Canada fooled the mighty, rich, ruthless U.S. into doing something it didn't understand? It was their idea to start with! Then they got Brian Mulroney's government and the CEOs of U.S. branch companies here to push it through. What did they gain?
How about 63 per cent of our oil, 56 per cent of our natural gas, and our powerlessness to cut back on those amounts even if every Canadian is freezing to death? What were we supposed to get? "Guaranteed access" to the U.S. market based on a "dispute settlement mechanism." Only there never was a dispute settlement mechanism. Just an Alice-in-Wonderland clause where each country gets to decide if it's applying its own laws properly when there's a complaint. Et voilà, softwood lumber.
Then why are there threats and gripes in the U.S.? Because it hasn't been good for everyone. An Ohio union leader told journalist JoAnn Wypijewski, "Who said there was going to be a giant sucking sound? They made a fool of him, but he was absolutely right." He means Ross Perot, in 1992, predicting the jobs effect of NAFTA if it went through. He said U.S. industrial jobs would move to places with lower wages and desperate people — like Mexico. But hey, Ohio, don't blame us. The sucking sound starts up here, passes through the U.S. to Mexico, then to even grimmer spots beyond.
Whole plants in Southern Ontario shipped themselves to the southern U.S. Take Nortel, once Canada's poster child for the superior employment that trade deals such as NAFTA would bring. It chugged public funding, then under the trade deals began shedding jobs — from more than 85,000, mostly Canadian, to about 30,000. Its Canadian work force is down to 6,800. This week, it said it would cut more North American jobs while adding them in China, India, Mexico and other "lower-cost regions." Flush.
So was NAFTA a bad deal? Yes. Was it a good deal? Yes. What's going on? It's all about who it's good for and who it's bad for. For this, you need to think a bit in terms of social class, which got harder when John Edwards dropped out of the Democratic race. He talked about those things.
Take Canada. According to economist Bruce Campbell, under NAFTA, the Big Three auto makers shrank their work force here by more than 50 per cent and increased revenues by 70 per cent. Employment declined in manufacturing and rose in the lower-paid service sector. Wages haven't grown at all since the original free-trade deal in 1988. That's a first.
Productivity has continued to rise, but, in the past, wages always rose "in tandem." Top CEOs in 2005 made 237 times more than the average wage, doubling the gap before NAFTA. Wages as a portion of the economic pie declined while profits rose. The top 0.1 per cent of earners doubled their income to $1,641,000; the bottom 95 per cent saw their share of the pie decline.
As for public goods, such as health care and education, we were told these would thrive under trade deals; but our governments have slashed social programs by 26 per cent. Oh, please don't toss us outta the NAFTA patch.
It's not just here. In the U.S., six out of 10 Republican voters say free trade did harm. Mexicans disapprove of NAFTA 2 to 1, the reverse of 10 years ago, before real experience set in. But we only hear about it from our leaders when an election is on: Chrétien-Martin in 1993, the Democrats now. When it's over — nothing. Try your class analysis on that phenomenon.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, Rick Salutin's column appears every Friday.
Showing posts with label Rick Salutin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rick Salutin. Show all posts
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Two articles on Ignatieff's "apology" for supporting Iraq war.
I doubt that Ignatieff's essay is worth all this spilled ink but both articles point out the obvious flaws and ludicrous aspects to Ignatieff's sort of taking back his support for the Iraq war, while retaining all the assumptions that led to his "mistake" in the first place.
How Michael Ignatieff put the 'I' in Iraq
On Michael Ignatieff's Times essay
>by Heather Mallick
August 13, 2007
My heart aches, and a nizzy dumbness—um, make that drowsy numbness—pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk ...
What? Sorry, I just read Michael Ignatieff's “Getting Iraq Wrong” thingy that ran in last week's New York Times Magazine, and my brain's as dizzy as Alberto Gonzales' fuzzy thinker in that ball thing on top of his neck. Gonzalez enters a fugue state whenever he testifies before a Senate committee, failing to recollect every meeting he ever attended if in fact he was there. The Onion has suggested that Gonzalez is not in fact the Attorney-General. He is a pool salesman from Tucson, Ariz., and he's got to get back there before the in-ground pool season ends, because that's where you get the big commissions. It's plausible.
That's how disoriented I am. I'm Cabana Al. Ignatieff's essay is so full of egotistical self-regard that I can practically see the buttons coming off his dress shirt as he typed it.
Writing a wrong
It starts with the headline, which I do understand is written not by him but by an editor (same thing happens here), but still. The headline should read “I was wrong about Iraq.” Instead, it is written in a tense almost as passive as the classic “Mistakes were made,” which is the one the Republicans use.
The headline begins with a gerund, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” as in “Leaving Las Vegas.” At least Nicolas Cage did in fact leave Las Vegas, by dying there. But Ignatieff does not really admit that he “got” Iraq wrong. Instead he attacks academics who predicted that the Iraqi invasion would be a disaster. They were right, Ignatieff says, but their rightness was based on ideology. Which is worse that rightness based on nobility, like Ignatieff's.
The really correct people were those who predicted a disaster but realized that George W. Bush had pure motives. “They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history.”
Mike? Everyone I respect thought Bush's famously “sexed-up” case for war was as packed with lies as the Tonkin Gulf Incident that led to an overwhelming vote for a full-out American war in Vietnam.
Not a cakewalk
When Colin Powell started talking about “yellowcake” in Iraq, I laughed out loud. Britain had already had a Cake hoax. In 1997, a terrible new drug called Cake was killing Britain's young people. You could make it in your own kitchen! The deaths of these deluded kids looking for a high were tragic and hideous. One poor girl threw up her own pelvis bone, a roped-in celebrity said on TV as he begged British youngsters to say no to Cake. If people give you Cake, “chuck it back in their face and tell them to F@#K OFF!” brayed comedian Bernard Manning.
As it turned out, satirist Chris Morris had made up the whole thing for his show Brass Eye. There was no such drug. No more bandwagons, please, he was saying. But Ignatieff joined the neocon bandwagon. And he had lived in Britain during the Cake campaign. Then again, he does seem to be entirely without humour.
Now he wants off, but only while mocking liberals for being smart and right from the start. He says their motives were practical, while his motive was admiration for the Iraqi Kurds who had been decimated by Saddam Hussein.
So Mike's a Kurdite. But I'm a Marshist. I yield to no one in my admiration for the Marsh Arabs. This noble isolated people lived in the original Garden of Eden, the marshes between the Tigris and the Euphrates drained and burned by Saddam. (Read Gavin Young's Return to the Marshes, for their history). That said, I still thought the invasion was wrong.
A matter of mistakes
Ignatieff says mistakes only matter to politicians, not academics. But if you backed a disastrously inept politician like Bush, you're still partly responsible for the destruction of the Iraqi nation, the hot new torture wave, a trillion dollars wasted and a massive rotting pile of severed limbs and eyeballs that cartoonishly sums up the grotesquerie of human wishes.
Ignatieff is claiming pure motives. Sure, if naivete is pure, he's pure as hand-churned butter. But I can't figure out how such an intellectual squirmer, pretending to confess to error while defending same, came close to winning the Liberal leadership.
As for the matter of Ignatieff baring his shallow soul in the New York Times rather than a Canadian publication, it is strange how much he still clearly grovels for respect from American power. But all this makes him is Brian Mulroney reborn, a stage struck politician for whom Canada is not really the desired audience.
But my sympathy then disappears. For Ignatieff actually wrote this. “As a former denizen of Harvard, I've had to learn that a sense of reality doesn't always flourish in elite institutions. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what's what than Nobel Prize winners.”
What a patronizing yet groveling Uriah Heep-ish remark. It translates as, “Not everyone at Harvard is as smart as me. Even a prole can figure things out better than my dumb rivals.” The prole and his offspring, of course, are the ones most likely to be sent to fight in Iraq.
He goes on. “The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn.” I think this means he is going to take the bus from now on and learn from the homespun wisdom of the yokel at the wheel. He's going to have to if he ever wants to run Canada. Which is why it won't happen. There was a time when Ignatieff was deeply interested in his fellow humans. You can read it in his earlier, admirable books, which remain in my living room, not exiled to the basement with Amis the Younger and the other mediocre stuff.
But there aren't even many humans quoted in his essay, and no Iraqi place names beyond Abu Ghraib. His nouns are all of the statesmen/wisdom/politician/paradigmatic/benchmarks kind. I can't claim to speak for eyeless orphans in Fallujah or even a criminally undereducated American soldier who now realizes he was sent over as bomb fodder to protect Big Oil. I can't even boast of being right about Iraq from the beginning. It actually depressed the hell out of me. And no opinionated person ever changed a reader's mind.
But I know smug when I see it. Ignatieff's piece is not a retraction. It's a theoretical, hedged amplification of a justification.
And the second article:
Feeling icky about Iggy
>by Rick Salutin
August 10, 2007
For a moment last Sunday, as I opened Michael Ignatieff's alleged mea culpa—Getting Iraq Wrong—in The New York Times Magazine (heralded in advance by The Globe and Mail and lauded by the Times's resident war critic, Frank Rich), I thought he might have learned something. Then I read his piece.
“One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis.” How obscene. It is Iraq that was shattered. There are two million internal and two million external refugees. Everyone has weapons. No one has dependable power and thus clean water except the occupiers in the increasingly targeted Green Zone. The people of Iraq bore the cost of the U.S. going in and staying, and they will bear the cost when and if it leaves. All U.S. losses are collateral damage.
Or this: The war's opponents “opposed the invasion because they believed ... America is always and in every situation wrong.” Exactly who said that, Michael? Could we have a name? It's a cheap straw man, that's all, to go along with platitudes such as, “Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.”
What was the error of the war's backers? That they took “wishes for reality” and supposed, “as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too.” What motives? To build “a free state” in Iraq, defend “human rights and freedom,” etc.
In other words, he accepts at face value all the rhetoric and propaganda used to justify the invasion. In other other words, there were no lies told. That's the stunning moment in his article. We are to believe that governments do not routinely lie about their motives, yet he himself writes in this very piece: “In public life, language is a weapon of war ... All that matters is what you said, not what you meant.” So we're supposed to believe George Bush did say what he meant? Let me catch my breath.
(There.) I admit I feel a bit icky attacking someone while he's trying to apologize, but I'm forcing myself because I think there's a larger issue here. I consider this article part of an effort to salvage a carefully constructed policy of Western interventionism in much of the world that has recently been sullied by the Iraq fiasco.
The policy itself remains. Tony Blair retires as British PM and morphs into a Mideast peace envoy, as if what that wretched region needs is yet more Western meddling. Gordon Brown takes over from him and prepares to depart Iraq but move even more heavily into Afghanistan, which gets typed as the good war, as opposed to the bad one in Iraq. The U.S. Democratic presidential candidates are all interventionists on this model. Yves Engler has presciently noted Canada's modest role in the pattern by policing Haiti, a tragic land that has suffered two centuries of near constant intervention.
The arguments for this course of action were built up by, among others, Michael Ignatieff, during the 1990s, when anti-communism was no longer available to justify Western foreign policy. The new rationales were human rights, failed states, right to protect, etc.
The showcases were Bosnia and Kosovo (though ethnic cleansing in Kosovo occurred after, and due to, the NATO bombing there), which led to Iraq and Afghanistan. It amounts to the same old world order of power politics, in a new dress. The only nations that claim the right to protect are those with the might to protect. The issue not addressed is whether foreign interventionism itself is a problem, complicit in many problems that “we” must then intervene in order to contain.
These policies have helped bring us to a point where almost everyone in the world is irate, terrified or both. It's time for a big rethink. That involves more than saying Oops about the isolated case of Iraq.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, Rick Salutin's column appears every Friday
How Michael Ignatieff put the 'I' in Iraq
On Michael Ignatieff's Times essay
>by Heather Mallick
August 13, 2007
My heart aches, and a nizzy dumbness—um, make that drowsy numbness—pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk ...
What? Sorry, I just read Michael Ignatieff's “Getting Iraq Wrong” thingy that ran in last week's New York Times Magazine, and my brain's as dizzy as Alberto Gonzales' fuzzy thinker in that ball thing on top of his neck. Gonzalez enters a fugue state whenever he testifies before a Senate committee, failing to recollect every meeting he ever attended if in fact he was there. The Onion has suggested that Gonzalez is not in fact the Attorney-General. He is a pool salesman from Tucson, Ariz., and he's got to get back there before the in-ground pool season ends, because that's where you get the big commissions. It's plausible.
That's how disoriented I am. I'm Cabana Al. Ignatieff's essay is so full of egotistical self-regard that I can practically see the buttons coming off his dress shirt as he typed it.
Writing a wrong
It starts with the headline, which I do understand is written not by him but by an editor (same thing happens here), but still. The headline should read “I was wrong about Iraq.” Instead, it is written in a tense almost as passive as the classic “Mistakes were made,” which is the one the Republicans use.
The headline begins with a gerund, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” as in “Leaving Las Vegas.” At least Nicolas Cage did in fact leave Las Vegas, by dying there. But Ignatieff does not really admit that he “got” Iraq wrong. Instead he attacks academics who predicted that the Iraqi invasion would be a disaster. They were right, Ignatieff says, but their rightness was based on ideology. Which is worse that rightness based on nobility, like Ignatieff's.
The really correct people were those who predicted a disaster but realized that George W. Bush had pure motives. “They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history.”
Mike? Everyone I respect thought Bush's famously “sexed-up” case for war was as packed with lies as the Tonkin Gulf Incident that led to an overwhelming vote for a full-out American war in Vietnam.
Not a cakewalk
When Colin Powell started talking about “yellowcake” in Iraq, I laughed out loud. Britain had already had a Cake hoax. In 1997, a terrible new drug called Cake was killing Britain's young people. You could make it in your own kitchen! The deaths of these deluded kids looking for a high were tragic and hideous. One poor girl threw up her own pelvis bone, a roped-in celebrity said on TV as he begged British youngsters to say no to Cake. If people give you Cake, “chuck it back in their face and tell them to F@#K OFF!” brayed comedian Bernard Manning.
As it turned out, satirist Chris Morris had made up the whole thing for his show Brass Eye. There was no such drug. No more bandwagons, please, he was saying. But Ignatieff joined the neocon bandwagon. And he had lived in Britain during the Cake campaign. Then again, he does seem to be entirely without humour.
Now he wants off, but only while mocking liberals for being smart and right from the start. He says their motives were practical, while his motive was admiration for the Iraqi Kurds who had been decimated by Saddam Hussein.
So Mike's a Kurdite. But I'm a Marshist. I yield to no one in my admiration for the Marsh Arabs. This noble isolated people lived in the original Garden of Eden, the marshes between the Tigris and the Euphrates drained and burned by Saddam. (Read Gavin Young's Return to the Marshes, for their history). That said, I still thought the invasion was wrong.
A matter of mistakes
Ignatieff says mistakes only matter to politicians, not academics. But if you backed a disastrously inept politician like Bush, you're still partly responsible for the destruction of the Iraqi nation, the hot new torture wave, a trillion dollars wasted and a massive rotting pile of severed limbs and eyeballs that cartoonishly sums up the grotesquerie of human wishes.
Ignatieff is claiming pure motives. Sure, if naivete is pure, he's pure as hand-churned butter. But I can't figure out how such an intellectual squirmer, pretending to confess to error while defending same, came close to winning the Liberal leadership.
As for the matter of Ignatieff baring his shallow soul in the New York Times rather than a Canadian publication, it is strange how much he still clearly grovels for respect from American power. But all this makes him is Brian Mulroney reborn, a stage struck politician for whom Canada is not really the desired audience.
But my sympathy then disappears. For Ignatieff actually wrote this. “As a former denizen of Harvard, I've had to learn that a sense of reality doesn't always flourish in elite institutions. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what's what than Nobel Prize winners.”
What a patronizing yet groveling Uriah Heep-ish remark. It translates as, “Not everyone at Harvard is as smart as me. Even a prole can figure things out better than my dumb rivals.” The prole and his offspring, of course, are the ones most likely to be sent to fight in Iraq.
He goes on. “The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn.” I think this means he is going to take the bus from now on and learn from the homespun wisdom of the yokel at the wheel. He's going to have to if he ever wants to run Canada. Which is why it won't happen. There was a time when Ignatieff was deeply interested in his fellow humans. You can read it in his earlier, admirable books, which remain in my living room, not exiled to the basement with Amis the Younger and the other mediocre stuff.
But there aren't even many humans quoted in his essay, and no Iraqi place names beyond Abu Ghraib. His nouns are all of the statesmen/wisdom/politician/paradigmatic/benchmarks kind. I can't claim to speak for eyeless orphans in Fallujah or even a criminally undereducated American soldier who now realizes he was sent over as bomb fodder to protect Big Oil. I can't even boast of being right about Iraq from the beginning. It actually depressed the hell out of me. And no opinionated person ever changed a reader's mind.
But I know smug when I see it. Ignatieff's piece is not a retraction. It's a theoretical, hedged amplification of a justification.
And the second article:
Feeling icky about Iggy
>by Rick Salutin
August 10, 2007
For a moment last Sunday, as I opened Michael Ignatieff's alleged mea culpa—Getting Iraq Wrong—in The New York Times Magazine (heralded in advance by The Globe and Mail and lauded by the Times's resident war critic, Frank Rich), I thought he might have learned something. Then I read his piece.
“One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis.” How obscene. It is Iraq that was shattered. There are two million internal and two million external refugees. Everyone has weapons. No one has dependable power and thus clean water except the occupiers in the increasingly targeted Green Zone. The people of Iraq bore the cost of the U.S. going in and staying, and they will bear the cost when and if it leaves. All U.S. losses are collateral damage.
Or this: The war's opponents “opposed the invasion because they believed ... America is always and in every situation wrong.” Exactly who said that, Michael? Could we have a name? It's a cheap straw man, that's all, to go along with platitudes such as, “Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.”
What was the error of the war's backers? That they took “wishes for reality” and supposed, “as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too.” What motives? To build “a free state” in Iraq, defend “human rights and freedom,” etc.
In other words, he accepts at face value all the rhetoric and propaganda used to justify the invasion. In other other words, there were no lies told. That's the stunning moment in his article. We are to believe that governments do not routinely lie about their motives, yet he himself writes in this very piece: “In public life, language is a weapon of war ... All that matters is what you said, not what you meant.” So we're supposed to believe George Bush did say what he meant? Let me catch my breath.
(There.) I admit I feel a bit icky attacking someone while he's trying to apologize, but I'm forcing myself because I think there's a larger issue here. I consider this article part of an effort to salvage a carefully constructed policy of Western interventionism in much of the world that has recently been sullied by the Iraq fiasco.
The policy itself remains. Tony Blair retires as British PM and morphs into a Mideast peace envoy, as if what that wretched region needs is yet more Western meddling. Gordon Brown takes over from him and prepares to depart Iraq but move even more heavily into Afghanistan, which gets typed as the good war, as opposed to the bad one in Iraq. The U.S. Democratic presidential candidates are all interventionists on this model. Yves Engler has presciently noted Canada's modest role in the pattern by policing Haiti, a tragic land that has suffered two centuries of near constant intervention.
The arguments for this course of action were built up by, among others, Michael Ignatieff, during the 1990s, when anti-communism was no longer available to justify Western foreign policy. The new rationales were human rights, failed states, right to protect, etc.
The showcases were Bosnia and Kosovo (though ethnic cleansing in Kosovo occurred after, and due to, the NATO bombing there), which led to Iraq and Afghanistan. It amounts to the same old world order of power politics, in a new dress. The only nations that claim the right to protect are those with the might to protect. The issue not addressed is whether foreign interventionism itself is a problem, complicit in many problems that “we” must then intervene in order to contain.
These policies have helped bring us to a point where almost everyone in the world is irate, terrified or both. It's time for a big rethink. That involves more than saying Oops about the isolated case of Iraq.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, Rick Salutin's column appears every Friday
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Toronto's Got a Lot to Learn
The rest of Salutin's column is at rabble. Miller did not renew his NDP membership so that he could be "independent". It seems that he has now become ineffective as well. The city government is playing games with the provincial government hoping to get more money but the threat to close down a subway route and also increase fares drastically make the city look quite foolish at a time when public transportation needs to be better funded and better utilised. Instead Miller's disastrous policies would increase the use of private cars and cause hardships for those not able to use cars.
Toronto's got a lot to learn
>by Rick Salutin
July 20, 2007
There was a classic failure of leadership here this week: a vote by Toronto's city council not to impose taxes on land transfers and car registrations. It's a textbook case, for study by future eras and civilizations.
Take as background an example of actual leadership. Here are the words of London Mayor Ken Livingstone, in 2000, shortly before his re-election after years of attacks on himself and his city, by both Thatcher Tories and Blair Labourites. “The great shining lie of British politics is that you can have good public services without putting up taxes.” He uses the hard word, lie; he states the worthy goal, good public services, instead of shabby ones; and he portrays the route to it — more taxes — as a challenge instead of something to apologize for. Here's the response, described by a reporter: “The crack of palm on palm was thunderous.”
No guts, no glory.
It is this kind of truth-telling, along with the prize when it works, that Toronto Mayor David Miller avoided. His main argument for adding taxes, reportedly, was that other big cities do it too. That's apologetic and imitative. Nor did he try to carry the issue to the people. It seems that he and his inner circle feared he'd just provide a target for the neo-cons and tax-haters. This kind of timidity is always wrong, not because it's strategically not astute, but because it shows distrust of your fellow citizens. It's all strategy in the end; the real trick is knowing how to call on people's better, more communal instincts.
I'd say he had a winner in both new taxes. Land transfer taxes would mainly affect developers and speculators, the guys who ran City Hall during the Art Eggleton to Mel Lastman years and against whom David Miller campaigned. Downtowners (like me) who saw their taxes rise as their property value theoretically soared, but who never planned to cash in because we love our homes, would've seen some relief. The car registration tax reflects everyone's main concern: the environment.
Those opposed didn't even have the guts to vote the new taxes down. They “deferred” a decision till after the coming provincial vote in order to pressure the political parties into promising more money to the city. For years, Toronto demanded the right to raise money beyond property taxes. The current government finally granted that right, so these elected municipal geniuses don't use it — as a tactic. That's both uninspiring and stupid.
As for those who like their politics strictly in terms of the games being played: Any time you're mayor, and you lose a vote 23-22, and you didn't find a way to bribe or bully that one vote you needed, you should give it some thought
Toronto's got a lot to learn
>by Rick Salutin
July 20, 2007
There was a classic failure of leadership here this week: a vote by Toronto's city council not to impose taxes on land transfers and car registrations. It's a textbook case, for study by future eras and civilizations.
Take as background an example of actual leadership. Here are the words of London Mayor Ken Livingstone, in 2000, shortly before his re-election after years of attacks on himself and his city, by both Thatcher Tories and Blair Labourites. “The great shining lie of British politics is that you can have good public services without putting up taxes.” He uses the hard word, lie; he states the worthy goal, good public services, instead of shabby ones; and he portrays the route to it — more taxes — as a challenge instead of something to apologize for. Here's the response, described by a reporter: “The crack of palm on palm was thunderous.”
No guts, no glory.
It is this kind of truth-telling, along with the prize when it works, that Toronto Mayor David Miller avoided. His main argument for adding taxes, reportedly, was that other big cities do it too. That's apologetic and imitative. Nor did he try to carry the issue to the people. It seems that he and his inner circle feared he'd just provide a target for the neo-cons and tax-haters. This kind of timidity is always wrong, not because it's strategically not astute, but because it shows distrust of your fellow citizens. It's all strategy in the end; the real trick is knowing how to call on people's better, more communal instincts.
I'd say he had a winner in both new taxes. Land transfer taxes would mainly affect developers and speculators, the guys who ran City Hall during the Art Eggleton to Mel Lastman years and against whom David Miller campaigned. Downtowners (like me) who saw their taxes rise as their property value theoretically soared, but who never planned to cash in because we love our homes, would've seen some relief. The car registration tax reflects everyone's main concern: the environment.
Those opposed didn't even have the guts to vote the new taxes down. They “deferred” a decision till after the coming provincial vote in order to pressure the political parties into promising more money to the city. For years, Toronto demanded the right to raise money beyond property taxes. The current government finally granted that right, so these elected municipal geniuses don't use it — as a tactic. That's both uninspiring and stupid.
As for those who like their politics strictly in terms of the games being played: Any time you're mayor, and you lose a vote 23-22, and you didn't find a way to bribe or bully that one vote you needed, you should give it some thought
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